


Still Life

by orphan_account



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: London, M/M, POV Harry Potter, i guess!!!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-30
Updated: 2019-11-30
Packaged: 2021-02-25 22:01:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21621649
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Relationships: Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter
Comments: 61
Kudos: 813





	Still Life

Draco never talked about money much, but Harry could tell he was still rich. He had fresh flowers all over his house, and nobody who wasn’t rich had the kind of money to buy that many flowers. Every time Harry went over they changed, and he didn’t know what they were but they always looked expensive and pretty, and the ones that didn’t look so expensive smelled sweet and fragrant. Draco kept those ones beside his bed, a bunch on each bedside table, in two matching vases that were really just white ceramic jugs with blue dots on them that looked like someone had painted on by hand. 

Once when Draco was behind him with one hand on the back of Harry’s thigh, moving his legs apart, Harry cast his eyes lazily over the headboard and Draco’s pillows and the corner of the book peeking out from under one of them, and noticed a chip in the handle of one of the vases. He felt good about it for some reason, and thought something mean about how maybe Draco couldn’t afford to replace it, even though he knew that wasn’t the case. 

Later on when he was getting ready to stand up and leave, he put his first finger on Draco’s shoulder and ran it all the way down his arm, pausing on the bump of the bone in his wrist. He wriggled his finger side to side a bit, moving the skin. Draco often said things along the lines of: “I bruise like a peach,” or, “ouch, Harry, fuck, I have very fragile skin, what’s wrong with you?” when Harry accidentally bumped him or something, and Harry had once caught him frowning over a mole on his arm. Harry wanted to find it funny, the way Draco was about things like that, but couldn’t really bring himself to.

“What?” Draco had said, his voice blurred and hazy, still half-asleep. “Stop it, piss off.” Harry swooped his finger from Draco’s wrist bone up to the tip of his index finger, and then flicked the back of his nail. 

“I have to go,” Harry said. He had to be up early, but he didn’t bother telling Draco this. The first time he had said it Draco had laughed at him in a way that meant he wasn’t amused by the situation, and said “yes alright,” and then paused, and then said, cryptically, “you can just _ leave, _you know, you don’t need to make up some imaginary morning appointment.” 

“Right, yeah,” Harry said. “I do have something tomorrow morning though, it’s not– I’d _ stay_, but–” He cut himself off at the look of horror dawning on Draco’s face. “No,” Harry agreed, sort of wanting to laugh. “Yes, I don’t know why I said that.” 

He’d left Draco’s almost immediately after, feeling so relieved when he stepped out into the cool night air, away from the smell of flowers and hand soap and Draco’s sheets. Walking home, he thought about what it would be like to sleep in that bed with Draco, and whether Draco would want to sleep far apart or close by, whether he would let Harry twist their legs together, loop his arm around Draco’s shoulders or put his forehead against the hard place at the top of Draco’s spine. To ask these questions of himself Harry had to suspend his own disbelief, because he wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to do any of those activities with Draco, though he had liked doing them with other people he had slept with before. He was so distracted that he walked all the way to Euston Square Station before realising that it was too late for the tube to be running, and had to find a secluded place to apparate back to his own flat, and arrived home dizzy and confused. 

*

Harry hadn’t slept with anyone in the same way he’d slept with Draco. He knew that even then, when they’d only fucked three times, at Draco’s gigantic apartment, in his bedroom and on the stark leather sofa. “Careful, careful,” Draco kept saying, low or gasping, angling his body this way and that, holding himself up at improbable angles. “If you get lube on these cushions I will honestly murder you.” Harry got bored of that pretty quickly and pulled him onto the floor, into the thick, deep rug that lived underneath the chrome feet of Draco’s coffee table. 

At the time he hadn’t thought about how weird it was for Draco to joke about murdering him, but then the next moment he wasn’t concentrating on sex he realised that it was, actually, very weird. Draco had spent a lot of time trying to– if not actively murder him, make sure he ended up dead, and that all the people he loved ended up dead. Harry hated it, hated that he’d said it, and when he called Draco up and told him, Draco had apologised and seemed sincere, but then didn’t talk to him at Neville’s birthday party apart the next weekend, apart from to say, with -– admittedly muted –- satisfaction that Harry had spilled beer on his front and should probably dry himself off.

Harry didn’t even mind that Draco acted the way he did, that he was childish and sometimes cruel, that he had all this money and never did anything with it apart from buy expensive things for himself. Harry thought it was probably alright that they were just sleeping with each other, because you didn’t have to like someone all that much to sleep with them. He thought about it in terms like this: he was allowed to have sex with someone attractive and mean sometimes just because he wanted to, and because he liked the way Draco was in bed, how he spoke and made noises and softened. How he was kind, occasionally, when Harry was tired or sad but not saying anything about it, like he knew. 

*

From then on whenever Harry went over to Draco’s apartment he couldn’t relax properly. Draco sent him a few emails and Harry looked at them over and over, reading the words Draco had written and wondering if there were other words underneath them that Draco had meant but not said. It made his head hurt, and once or twice he had a hard time sleeping. He didn’t know if he could talk to anybody about it, because all of his friends thought that he and Draco still didn’t like each other, which might have been true, and didn’t talk unless forced by proximity or politeness, which definitely wasn’t. 

“Can you like someone and not like them at the same time?” Harry asked Ginny, when he was over at her house after a game once. She lived in a small village outside of Holyhead, and had a back garden that led all the way down to tall, black cliffs, and the sea beyond them. Dean was in the kitchen, taking bread out of the oven for lunch. 

“Yes?” she said, and took a sip of her still-steaming tea. “Sort of how I like you and then you ask me questions like this, and I have no idea how to respond?”

“Who are you talking about,” Dean called in, and Harry shook his head. He did not want to confess to anybody that he had been sleeping with Draco while not liking him. Everyone put up with Draco now, and invited him places, and to parties and anniversaries, and Hermione always made an effort to include the Slytherins in day trips or holiday plans, and said sometimes that it was all turning out the way it really should have, if none of the war stuff had ever happened. Harry didn’t know about all that, but he knew that if he were to tell Ginny or Dean or Hermione about the way things were with Draco they might be – disappointed in him. 

*

“Let’s go for dinner,” Draco had said, around Christmas the year before, when the city was still with snow. Harry had been over half the day, doing nothing, seeing how many times he could get Draco to come before Draco couldn’t anymore, and stopped him. 

“Okay,” he said, and put on his underwear and his jeans and his heavy winter coat, and they went out into the falling snow. “Do you know somewhere?” Harry had asked, after fifteen minutes of walking, through the square where Draco lived and down the street towards Euston, turning slippery corners and knocking elbows. 

“Yes,” Draco said, and led Harry to an Indian restaurant that was still open, with wooden tables and benches and steamed up windows.

They had talked haltingly, about Harry’s job and the friends they had in common and which Quidditch team Draco supported, and then went back to Draco’s after and Draco went down on him for a long time, and Harry went home afterwards, and Draco hadn’t emailed him again for a week and a half. He guessed he’d done something wrong, because Draco didn’t suggest anything like that again. Eventually Harry started to think that if Draco wanted to, Harry would go on another date with him, but Draco never left any space between them where Harry could have said – listen– let’s do it again, maybe, if you want. 

Harry wanted someone to tell him how he felt, because he didn’t know. He had liked being led somewhere he hadn’t been before, and kissed up against someone’s bedroom door. He wondered if it made him a bad person, that when he imagined doing those things again it wasn’t with Draco, it wasn’t really with anyone. He wondered what Draco would think if he found out that Harry couldn’t decide whether to like him or not. 

“Maybe we should stop this,” Draco said, on one rare night they’d spent at Harry’s house in Kingston, where he could afford to live alone. His bedroom had a view of the entrance to Richmond Park, and sometimes Harry took his elderly neighbour’s dog from three doors down for a walk there, where it would bark loudly at the peaceful deer. “Having sex with each other.” 

“Oh,” Harry said, and looked over at him. Draco was sitting on the edge of the bed, watching him with serious eyes. He breathed in deeply through his nose. “If that’s what you want to do,” he said, carefully. 

“I want to stop being the only person who– suggests things, here,” Draco said, in a rush, and then shook his head very fast. “I don’t know. Pretend I didn’t say that.” 

“Okay, fine,” Harry said, and then Draco left, and Harry opened the window that overlooked the garden and lay in his bed and felt his chest become heavy and sad and then, after a while, hollow. He thought about what Draco had said about suggesting things, and didn’t understand it, and didn’t know why he was thinking about it in the first place. Other people didn’t feel this way, he suspected, upset when things happened that they did not particularly care about. 

Even though Draco had suggested it and Harry had agreed, they didn’t stop sleeping with each other. It got worse, even, if worse meant that Harry started going to Draco’s flat most nights, when he was tired after work and should have just gone home to shower and sleep. Draco didn’t have a job, and as far as Harry could tell he lived as though every one of his days was a Sunday, with hours to sit and do whatever he wanted. He met Pansy for brunch, he met Blaise at the bookshop where Greg worked, he went to the market to buy leeks and potatoes and then made soup, and asked Harry if he wanted some when Harry arrived at his door one evening with cold rain running down inside the collar of his jacket. 

Draco spent a long, luxurious time doing things to Harry in bed, and when Harry thought about telling him to hurry up, he found that he never really wanted him to. Draco fucked Harry in the giant shower, hot water running over his back. They had sex on the floor in the living room, where the pale floorboards sloped curiously down at a steep angle towards the front of the house. Harry put his hands in Draco hair, leant his head right back to look at the ceiling. While Draco went to shower afterwards, Harry stood outside on the light, terrifying balcony, and watched the changing lights on the BT tower. The way he felt was like waiting. Like being at a bus stop alone, no traffic on the roads, no timetable, hoping something, anything, would happen to him. He did not know how to explain it to himself any better than that. 

*

Harry thought about Draco in work when he should be doing any number of other things. He thought about Draco in bed, how nice he was, how _ kind, _how weird it was that he should be kind. He put his hand on the back of Harry’s head when Harry sucked him off, and watched him wide-eyed, and muttered occasionally about how Harry shouldn’t go that deep, because he’d hurt himself. When Harry asked him to he would pull on his hair, or sometimes fuck his mouth, but then he’d forget what he was meant to be doing after a while and his grip would go loose again, and he would stroke his fingers softly over the back of Harry’s neck, his eyes closed, his head tilted back. 

*

The odd night, Harry even dreamt about him. He lay somewhere in the dream thinking he was by himself, and then all of a sudden Draco would be there with him too, looking back at him or reading or asleep in sunlight. Harry would wake up and wonder if this meant he was in love. Why else would he dream like that about somebody, dream about wanting them close, dream about having them nearby, doing quiet things.

*

He and Ron were sitting opposite each other on the tube, about to arrive at Great Portland Street, when Ron squinched his eyes down at the A-Z he carried around with him, and said, “I need to pick up something from Malfoy’s place, do you mind if we get off here?” 

“What?” Harry asked, but then the train was coming to a slow stop and Ron was out of his seat anyway, picking his way to the doors. “What do you need to pick up?” He followed Ron anyway, they were supposed to be spending the day finding something for Hermione’s birthday present. Harry still didn’t have any good ideas, he was hoping they’d find something in the very expensive bookshop around the corner from the British Library. Hermione was a difficult person to buy presents for, because she was very particular and also very nice, and would tell you she liked whatever you decided to get her, even if she didn’t. Harry thought he’d been successful last year with the cauldron set, but it was hard to tell. 

Ron blushed. “He mentioned– lending me a suit,” he said. “For Hermione’s birthday dinner. We’re both quite tall.”

“Oh my god,” Harry said.

“I’m not going to _ buy _a fucking suit,” Ron said, and made an odd face, tilting his head to one side. “Until we get married, I suppose.” 

Draco let them in with minimum surprise. “Did you find it alright?” he said, only looking at Harry very briefly before turning away in the direction of his bedroom. They hadn’t actually found it alright, because Ron kept taking left turns when he should have gone right, and Harry didn’t know how to suddenly admit he knew exactly where Draco’s apartment was, that he knew his way from Great Portland Street, from Euston Square, from as far afield a station as Tottenham Court Road, even. He had been at Draco’s apartment not half a day earlier, when they’d kissed lazily, muzzily, on Draco’s bed, when Harry had left late and sprinted flat out to get the last bus home. He could have said that to Ron, but didn’t, and instead let them walk further and further away from Draco’s apartment, feeling stupider and stupider about everything he’d ever done in his life, or said, or thought, even the things that had nothing to do with Draco at all. 

“Come on,” Draco said, calling them into his room. He had put new sheets on since last night, the soft, grey ones, and had brand new flowers on his bedside tables. “You can try it on in here,” he said, laying a dark burgundy suit jacket onto the bed, the trousers next to them, crisply, perfectly creased. 

Ron went over and picked them up, and Harry watched him, helplessly. Draco had worn that suit to Pansy’s birthday dinner, when they’d all gone to an expensive cocktail bar and got expensively drunk, when he’d bumped against Harry in the hallway outside the toilets, and then paused, and then glanced around, and then pressed a single, solemn kiss to Harry’s temple.

Out in the hallway, as Ron changed into Draco’s suit, Harry kissed him. His limbs had an odd, tender feeling about them, and he was afraid to talk, and thought he’d better not. He bit Draco’s bottom lip, being nice about it, and put his hands on either side of Draco’s face. Everything felt giant and terrifying, and he was probably in love, now that he thought about it. Harry considered saying something important or meaningful, but he didn’t have anything, he didn’t have a single thing. 

“Right,” Draco said, against Harry’s lips, right up close to them. Neither of them stopped what they were doing. “Ron’s–” Harry kissed his chin, his mouth again– “in my fucking bedroom, Harry–” 

Harry kissed his neck, the lobe of his ear, pulled his shirt aside, kissed his collarbone. He thought he might die, but it didn’t matter much. He thought that later on, perhaps, he would think of something to say.


End file.
